Sister, can you spare a dime?

'A bit of sleuthing into funding for the arts'

Last week, I was in my hometown of Liverpool for the Homotopia Festival. After my show had ended, I found myself glistening with sweat, beaming maniacally and hoping to see the festival director for a post-show schmooze. I was unceremoniously told he had rushed off to dinner with an airline sponsor. Before I could throw even a minor fit, another performer who had been standing nearby chirped, ‘Well, I guess that they’re the ones who keep the whole thing running, aren’t they?’ 

Is it so? What a depressing thought. Was I being naive in imagining that artists were at the centre of festivals? I mean, honestly, does sponsorship mean being sold into human bondage entirely? Are we all bound to the corporate logos which grease the wheels of the arts? Apparently so. ‘How else can one fund one’s work?’ one wonders.

So one decided to pop on one’s Angela Lansbury wig and do a bit of sleuthing into the mysterious haunted mansion of funding for the arts. How does anyone ever get anything done? I asked a few celebrity pals which avenues they had investigated in the epic struggle to squeeze a tenner for a tube of Revlon out of better-lined pockets than theirs.

The Arts Council et al: PhD in bureaucratese required?

Most famously (and most tediously) there’s the Arts Council – the very name causes the sort of palpitations one imagines courtiers felt in the presence of those medieval monarchs slightly deranged with mercury poisoning. Will they lavish you with a fortune and legitimise you with a logo or will they dismiss you – or worse, de-fund you? Torture is almost certain as just about anyone who has filled in the hideous online proposal will tell you. Often it seems entirely futile – you need a PhD in bureaucratese to comprehend the wretched thing – and from an artist’s perspective it can feel like the decisions being made are sewn up in advance by out-of-touch dowagers at dusty desks somewhere in the Midlands, following oblique and prosaic guidelines.

Maybe there is something to be learned from the secretarial slog towards funding. It can inform the work, keep us inside the world we are apparently commenting on. It’s the equivalent to a desk job for many artists now – we’re all working on flexi-time, unless of course we are oligarchs or heiresses.

Wealthy patrons: anyone at home?

Yes, what about those grandes dames who swan around throwing cash at penniless painters? Where is Peggy Guggenheim when you need her? Holestar again: ‘We need a pool of rich people who love and want to support the arts, especially the more experimental and unconventional sides. Bland has it locked down.’

I’ll say! Derek Jarman made several of his early film by charming the well-heeled at cocktail parties but maybe the rich don’t think artists are a safe investment anymore – unless it’s the kind that looks lovely in a frame above the sofa in the library.

Your own pocket

Prostitution aside, self-funding is a subject that experimental writer/performer Jeffrey Gordon Baker has a lot to say about. He and his team produced their show ‘I Became Luminous’ in Edinburgh and at the Rag Factory with their own money. ‘We self-funded mainly because we knew that this version of “I Became Luminous” would be very experimental. We wanted to try anything that came to mind and so couldn’t make – and didn't want to make – any promises to the Arts Council or whoever. Artistically, it was very liberating to know that we could do anything we wanted. And that affected the work, making it much more of an experimental, chaotic mishmash… The trade-off is that we had no money or energy whatsoever to put into getting an audience. We also completely broke the bank which stressed us out. So we are left with a piece that could be great but no energy, money or motivation to finish it.’

Let’s put on the show right here!

It seems then that there is no easy way to find the funds – what an entirely expected anti-climax. Somebody always has to pay, and often the price is higher than expected: friendships fly out of the window with the finances in fits of artistic temperament. I myself have been offered the opportunity to stage a ‘retrospectacle’ of my theatre work at Ovalhouse in spring 2012 – something which looks set to be quite costly – and so I am throwing a fundraiser to generate a bit of green towards the assorted inanities of theatrical production (the grease paint and the NI contributions mainly). It features a who’s who of cabaret performers including Jonny Woo, Ophelia Bitz, David Hoyle, Fancy Chance, Myra DuBois, Anna Lewenhaupt and the above-quoted Holestar, Jordan Hunt and Jeffrey Gordon Baker themselves. You are cordially invited. And maybe if I raise enough money, we will all be spared more rambling like this, for at least a few months. One can but hope.